The MT Memorial in Carnegie Hall;
Joseph Choate is speaking; Cable is in the front row,
second in from the right.

Cable's Reminiscences

[George Washington Cable was one of the speakers at
the memorial service held for MT in New York on 30
November 1910. He devoted the second half of his remarks
to his recollections of the "Twins of Genius" tour,
which, in remarks delivered at MT's Seventieth Birthday
Dinner, he'd called "one of the most notable experiences
of my life."]

It is because of that hold [MT] has on all our
hearts -- and I speak for the whole American people -- it
was that spirit that caused an audience once in Paris,
Kentucky, who had applauded him until their palms were sore
and until their feet were tired, and who had laughed as he
came forward for the fourth alternation of our reading
together -- the one side of him dragging, one foot limping
after the other -- the peculiar way known to us all -- the
house burst into such a storm of laughter, coming from so
crowded a house, that Mark Twain himself, grim controller
of his emotions at all times, burst into laughter and had
to acknowledge to me, as he came off the platform: "Yes,
yes" -- still laughing with joy of it himself -- "yes; they
got me off my feet that time."

I remember the hold he had upon children's hearts,
another field of his human kindness to all humankind. It is
illustrated in an experience he had in Cincinnati when
certain children were brought by their aunt to hear Mark
Twain read from his pages in that great city, brought down
from the town of Hamilton, and who went back home in the
late hours of the night, beside themselves with the delight
of their clear understanding and full appreciation of his
humor, saying to their kinswoman: "Oh, Auntie! Oh, Auntie!
It was better than Buffalo Bill!"

One point I should like to make to indicate the
conscientiousness with which he held himself the custodian
of the affections of the great mass of the people who loved
him in every quarter of the land. It was the rigor of his
art, an art which was able to carry the added burden beyond
the burden of all other men's art, the burden of absolutely
concealing itself and of making him appear, whenever he
appeared, as slipshod in his mind as he was in his gait. We
were at Toronto, Canada. The appointment was for us to read
two nights in succession, and he had read one night. The
vast hall was filled to overflowing. I heard from the
retiring room the applause that followed every period of
his utterance, heard it come rolling in and tumbling like
the surf of the ocean. Well, at last, as we were driving
home to our hotel, I found him in an absolutely wretched
condition of mental depression, groaning and sighing, and
all but weeping, and I asked him what in the world
justified such a mood -- a man who had just come from such
a triumph. "Such a triumph?" he said. "A triumph of the
moment; but those people are going home to their beds, glad
to get there, and they will wake up in the morning ashamed
of having laughed at my nonsense."

"Nonsense?" I said. "How is it nonsense?"

"I have spent the evening, and their time, and taxed
them to the best of their ability to show appreciation of
my wit and humor, and I have spent that whole time simply
spinning yarns."

I said: "Don't mind; you are going to meet virtually the
very same audience to-morrow, and to-morrow night you shall
give them good literature, if any living writer in a living
language has got that chance." I don't know if he slept
that night, but I know he did what he did not often relish.
He rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed, and the next
night he gave them a programme which he chose to begin, at
my suggestion, with the Blue Jay's Message. He left
that house as happy as any one ever saw Mark Twain, and
that was with a feeling of acute joy because he had won
friends he considered worthy, he had won every handclap and
applause with a programme worthy of honor.

One more point: every one knows that one of his passions
was for history, and I assume that that passion for history
was one of the demonstrations of his human kindness. It was
the story of the human heart, and he loved history because
it was the story of humanity.

One night we were in Rochester together. It was Saturday
night, and for a wonder we were without an engagement that
night, so we started out for a walk; we had gone a few
steps when we found a bookstore, and at the same moment it
was beginning to rain. I said: "Let us go in here." He
said: "I remember I have not provided myself with anything
to read all day to-morrow." I said: "We will get it here. I
will look down that table, and you will look down this."
Presently I went over to him and said I had not found
anything that I thought would interest him, and asked him
if he had found anything. He said no, he had not; but there
was a book he did not remember any previous acquaintance
with. He asked me what that book was.

"Why," I said, "that is Sir Thomas Malory's Morte
d'Arthur." And he said: "Shall we take it?" I said:
"Yes; and you will never lay it down until you have read it
from cover to cover." It was easy enough to make the
prophecy, and, of course, it was fulfilled. He had read in
it a day or two, when I saw come upon his cheekbones those
vivid pink spots which every one who knew him intimately
and closely knew meant that his mind was working with all
its energies. I said to myself: "Ah, I think Sir Thomas
Malory's Morte d'Arthur is going to bear fruit in
the brain of Mark Twain." A year or two afterward, when he
came to see me in my Northhampton home, I asked him what he
was engaged in, and he said he was writing a story of A
Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. I said: "If that be
so, then I claim for myself the godfathership of that
book." He said: "Yes; you are its godfather." I can claim
no higher honor than to have the honor to claim that here
and now, to-night, and to rejoice with you that we are able
to offer a tribute to our affection to the memory of Mark
Twain.